Historic Costume Collection Makes a Move

Have you ever wondered how a historic costume collection might be moved from one location to another? Last December, a company called Hogan Transfer & Storage did just that when the Elizabeth Sage Historic Costume Collection had to move to its new home at Indiana University’s Bloomington campus. The entire moving process took about five days.

The collection, founded in 1937, was donated when Elizabeth Sage, the university’s first ever clothing and textiles professor, retired. It was her private collection and it consisted of costumes and textiles from all over the world and time periods. The collection now consists of two parts – museum quality pieces for research and exhibition and a study collection used in classrooms. Either way, the collection had to be relocated with the utmost care.

The importance of hiring a professional moving company to handle the move rather than relying on university staff should be clear. Who would want to risk damaging artifacts dating back hundreds of years or priceless designer clothes during the event?

During the move, the movers had to disassemble and reassemble 105 different sections of specialized racking and relocate over 1200 acid-free storage containers holding artifacts. Throughout the entire relocation process, movers had to maintain numerical order of storage containers as well as deal with 58 rolling racks of clothing! And you thought emptying your closet was a challenge!